By the early 1960s, white students from northern colleges had been mobilized by southern civil rights groups, such as Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, to help with desegregation. The presence of liberal-minded whites at voter registration drives and sit-ins against businesses that refused to serve blacks gave the Civil Rights movement more public attention than it had before. More media outlets started covering violent demonstrations during this period,

From its first publication, A Long and Happy Life has been recognized as the start of a major literary career, showing a promise of talent that Reynolds Price has continued to make good on to this day. Robert Drake, writing in the Southern Review, noted that the book "stood out like a beacon of light, or, at the least, a breath of fresh air" among other works of the time that were more...